


lo and behold

by tirralirra



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Beholders, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Gen, M/M, Post-Time Skip, Pre-Time Skip, Supernatural Elements, Tragedy, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28870911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tirralirra/pseuds/tirralirra
Summary: His name was Miya Atsumu, and he was a God.....To Kiyoomi, he was only ever Miya, though.A story based on Ruru’s (heartbreaking) manga “My Childhood Friend Was a God”
Relationships: Miya Atsumu & Miya Osamu, Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 15
Kudos: 50





	1. Miya Osamu

**Author's Note:**

> **TW/CW:** As tagged above, this contains interpretations of **Major Character Death, open/ambiguous ending, and unrequited love.** I say interpretations, because you could interpret the plot more or less tragically as you wish, but regardless, it is tragedy.
> 
> This is based on Ruru (Wataame Watagashi)’s “Osananajimi ga Kamisama datta hanashi” or “My Childhood Friend Was a God”. It is a oneshot, R18 manga, so I won’t be directly linking where I read it, but please support the author and the original work on [Pixiv](https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/80699521) if you can (and are of age).

Every few decades or so, a God is born into this world as a human child. They live as a human while they grow up, and experience the world as any other child would.

Well, with a few caveats.

* * *

First, every God bears a jewel on their chest.

* * *

Miya Atsumu bears a gem the color of a sunrise, gold and rose-tinged, embedded just to the left of his sternum, over his heart.

Osamu doesn’t understand it at first. He looks at Atsumu and sees a mirror of himself in almost every respect, save for that one, glimmering sliver, the only hint at something otherworldly about an otherwise perfectly human body.

And Atsumu _is_ human, in all other respects. Osamu sees his humanity in the scrapes on his knees, hears it in the plaintive whines for Osamu’s attention, tastes it in the soft flesh of his skin when their childhood fights get a little out of hand. Atsumu smells like the seasons he wears on his shoulders as they tumble and wander and explore their backyard, the park, the nearby forest and fields; it’s the fresh earth of spring, the sweet grass of summer, the rich color of fall, or the strange clarity of winter. But so does Osamu, by his side for all of it. 

When they start playing volleyball, too, he sees it. It’s in the work Atsumu puts in, effort no less than any other. Long evenings stretched out like taffy, worked over and over for one more set, one more spike, one more drill to one hundred, one thousand.

They say that Gods can make plants bloom and creatures gather, that they shine with an aura when truly happy. Miya Atsumu is interested in exactly none of that—he only wants to prove himself as a setter, not bound or boosted by divinity or anything else except his hard work.

Atsumu and Osamu never really talk about it, the God thing. It was something that has always been a part of them, something they never needed to talk about because it just _is._ Osamu only remembers one distinct time:

“It’s unfair. I’m supposed to be a God, right? Why are you the one who’s better?” Atsumu huffs, prone on their bedroom floor and the very picture of a toddler tantrum at age eleven. It’s been a long day of volleyball clinics where Osamu set more than he spiked, and Atsumu spiked more than he set, much to Atsumu’s consternation.

Osamu just gives him a long, long look. 

“You’re right. It’s unfair,” he finally says, but he doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t need to. It’s unfair that Atsumu is a God, but not because of any Godly benefits.

Atsumu never says something is unfair between the two of them ever again.

===

So sure, Miya Atsumu is a God, but he is a graceless one.

* * *

Second, no matter what time, what age, humans will fear the Gods.

* * *

It doesn’t start like that. Miya Atsumu whips through early childhood like a tempest, with his heart on his sleeve and his twin by his side. They laugh, they cry, they play and fight. They are outright delights and terrors at turns, the two of them. Just the Miya Twins.

Their parents don’t show it either, not at all. Equal praise, equal scolding. Equal love in all the ways that matter.

Once though, just once, Osamu slinks downstairs for a glass of water in the middle of the night and catches the tail end of a furious and whispered conversation between them. He hears the words “why would anyone call this a blessing…” but he turns away quickly at the sound of sniffles, of tears.

He creeps back upstairs, water forgotten, and back into their shared bedroom. He climbs up the ladder to Atsumu’s bunk and slips under the covers, curls up next to him, and thinks. It’s the first time he’s ever heard his parents cry. It’s the first time something feels wrong in the world.

In the morning Atsumu gives him crap for getting scared of the dark and sneaking into his bed like a little kid, and just like that the world is back to normal, just the two of them, them against the world. He stuffs the lingering fear of something he doesn’t know yet deep, deep down, and tells himself _what could possibly be scary against the two of us?_ The Miya Twins, a God and his Beholder.

===

As it turns out, the world may not scare them, but the rest of the world might be scared _of_ them. Scared of Atsumu, at least.

It prickles up the back of Osamu’s neck, their teammates’ whispers in junior high. _He’s really good, but it’s scary, right? Playing with a God._ He doesn’t know how, or who, but suddenly everyone knows exactly what Atsumu is.

They say Gods should live their lives like normal, but that doesn’t stop people from treating Atsumu differently. Maybe it’s just the rumor mill. Maybe it’s just a part of his brash personality. Or, maybe it really is a side effect of his supposed divine presence. All of those options bother Osamu in different ways, but the most bothersome thing is that Atsumu isn’t bothered at all.

“Say, Tsumu. You know, they’re scared of you, the team,” Osamu ventures one day at lunch, testing the waters. This is as close to talking about _it_ as they’ve come in a while.

“So?” Atsumu says around a mouthful of rice, unflappable as always.

“So. I don’t know. Nevermind,” Osamu huffs, and digs into his own food with a vengeance. He doesn’t know where he wants to go with that, what he wants to accomplish. Stupid Tsumu. Stupid Gods and stupid beholding—why does Osamu have to be the one to watch his brother twist every bit of Godhood into its worst possible form? Or watch everyone else do what he doesn’t do himself? He can divine himself into a wall, for all he cares, Osamu lies to himself. 

===

Still, he watches. Carefully, because that’s his job. As Atsumu’s brother, not his Beholder.

“Hey. Why do you always look like that?” Osamu asks after an old couple stops them to bow and pray. Well, they stopped Atsumu.

“Look like what?” Atsumu replies, walking backwards to face Osamu. 

“You make that face, every time someone stops to pray,” Osamu says, scrunching his nose in distaste. That he has to explain, not at the face.

“What face? It’s a smile. We have the same face. Show me!”

“No, no, it’s different. I can’t do it, and it’s...it’s too nice. For you.” It’s not real, he realizes. It’s a whole facade that Atsumu has been building over the last few years of awareness, so incrementally it escaped Osamu’s watchful eyes.

It’s his face for their reverence, because it’s something he never wanted but has come to accept. Piety, devotion, worship. Whatever they want to call it, it just tastes sour, like fear, to Osamu. 

===

In high school, Osamu works to make sure that fear is solely on the basis of volleyball, at least outside of their little town, their prefecture. High school’s famous volleyball twins. Not a God and his Beholder.

It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference at their school, but it’s successful everywhere else. When Atsumu gets named the best high school setter in their second year, when they come home with second place at Interhigh, when he gets the invite to the All Japan Youth Camp—it’s all for Miya Atsumu, setter. Not Miya Atsumu, God.

And then Atsumu comes back from that camp with another new expression, but there’s nothing fake about it. It’s all dorky and sappy instead. 

“He’s just...incredible, you know? There’s no other word for it. And that’s really saying something, coming from me.” Atsumu waxes on and on about Sakusa Kiyoomi, Japan’s number one high school ace, oh He of the Bendy Wrists and Snarky Wit. I even got his number, Samu, we’re _friends_ now.

This isn’t what Atsumu had to say about Sakusa at Interhigh. No, that was far more frustrated and competitive. It still sounds like they went head to head, but came out the other end as begrudging acquaintances (for Sakusa) or friends (for Atsumu). Someone who finally likes Atsumu for who he is, and doesn’t know or fear him for what he is.

And, oh Gods (ha), Osamu realizes what this is after day five of too many anecdotes from a short training camp and random spurts of furious text messaging. This is his brother, Atsumu, with a _crush._ He finally finds some nut as volleyball-obsessed as he is and obliging enough to indulge him, and throws caution to the wind. Volleyball before Godhood.

Still, Osamu feels a familiar prickle at his neck, except this time it drips with poison too, seeping into his spine and making him stiff with anxiety. Osamu sees the seed of this love and wants to rip it out before it takes root, before it digs into Atsumu’s bedrock of resolve, before it makes him waver, because he can’t. He can’t watch his brother’s heart break for this. It’s not fair. Nothing about being a God or a Beholder is fair.

Osamu knows the end of this story and Atsumu does too, so he can’t figure out why Atsumu wants this anyways. Not yet. He will though. That’s his job, as his Beholder.

* * *

The last caveat is that once they turn twenty, they become one with the world, and return to being Gods. They only leave their gem behind.

* * *

Gods. What a thing to behold.


	2. Sakusa Kiyoomi

Sakusa Kiyoomi meets Miya Atsumu properly for the first time in December of his second year. It is cold, a proper winter in Tokyo, the dry air nipping at the skin of his fingers. The loud, blond-haired setter from Hyogo though—it seems he’s certainly full of hot air. Or maybe that’s just because they piss each other off almost right away.

Kiyoomi remembers facing him and his brother across the net just a handful of months ago. Inarizaki lost, Itachiyama won. They may have shook hands, exchanged a nod, but it was an interaction lost among countless others for Kiyoomi. 

This time, when they meet again, they shake hands, but Miya doesn’t let go until Kiyoomi pulls his hand away. Miya lets him. 

“Sakusa Kiyoomi, huh,” he drawls, “Pleased to finally have a chance to talk to you without a net between us.”

“Honestly, I think I might prefer it when there’s a few prefectures between us,” Kiyoomi snipes back, lightly, wary of his approach, on the defense immediately.

“Aw, c’mon Kiyoomi-kun, you don’t mean that, you’re gonna love my sets, I’m sure of it,” Miya says with a laugh, then makes an exaggerated thinking pose. Chin in his forefinger and thumb, he rambles on, “Kiyoomi-kun is kind of a mouthful though—”

“It’s just Sakusa, thanks.”

“—Ki. Yo. Omi. Kiyo. Omi. Omi-kun. Omi-kun!” he snaps his fingers. “Perfect, don’t you think? Nice and snappy.”

Kiyoomi cannot believe the audacity of this guy. They barely know each other. “Miya—”

“It’s Atsumu.”

“Then I’m Sakusa.”

“Ahhhh well,” Miya smiles obnoxiously, “I guess Miya is fine for now. It’s not like Samu is here anyways,” Miya keeps grinning and turns to walk away. “Hope we’re on the same team a lot for this camp, Omi-kun. And if not, well, I still owe you for Interhigh.” He _winks._

What the hell?

===

Frustratingly enough, Miya stays on his mind for the rest of the first day, because he’s keen to avoid a repeat of that dreadful introduction. This may have been his plan all along, he realizes, especially since Miya doesn’t seek him more than necessary.

Even more infuriating is the fact that he was right. His setting technique is amazing. Kiyoomi knows he can be picky about sets, but Atsumu adjusts to his style within a few plays.

It feels good.

Then at dinner he sees Miya sitting with Motoya. Sensing the potential for disaster, he makes his way over quickly. Miya spies him and smirks, leaning onto Motoya right as Kiyoomi drops his tray to the table.

“Mori-kun,” he croons, “you’ve gotta tell me your spiker’s biggest weakness. Just so I can account for it in my sets, of course,”

“Komori—” Kiyoomi starts to growl.

“It’s rotten food,” Motoya answers, the traitor, but Miya pouts.

“You know what I meant.”

“Sorry, Atsumu-kun, blood is thicker than water and yadda yadda,” Motoya answers, lazily flapping a hand and digging into his meal with zeal. Miya looks surprised.

“You’re related?” He looks between them with increasingly higher eyebrows. “ _Really._ ”

Kiyoomi aims a kick at Motoya under the table, but misses and jabs Miya instead.

“Ow! C’mon, Omi-kun, I’m just kidding, geez,” Miya makes a rueful face, but still smiles across the table at him.

Motoya smirks around a mouthful of food. “ _Omi-kun?”_ he garbles out.

And it’s all downhill from there. But, even as he bickers with his cousin, and with Miya, and insults get thrown around the table in increasingly more bizarre variations, and other players get pulled into the mess until they look like the rowdy bunch of high school boys they actually are, Kiyoomi has fun. It’s a thrill to find that Miya keeps him on top of his game on the court and off.

===

Kiyoomi thinks he knows Miya now enough for a lifetime, but he meets a different Miya Atsumu later that night. They cross paths by chance in front of one of the Ajinomoto Centers outdoor vending machines. It’s late, almost certainly past curfew, but Kiyoomi needed some fresh air and some space from all the new names and faces.

He expects Miya to greet him loudly and cheekily like the rest of the day, and braces himself for the onslaught, but all he receives is quiet surprise and a polite nod. He even lets Kiyoomi purchase his drink first, before punching in his own choice.

By mutual non-verbal agreement of their shared delinquency, they retire to a nearby bench with their drinks. And, mercifully, it’s peace for a few minutes. They breathe and stare up at the murky, overcast Tokyo sky. Their clouds of breath intermingle and dissipate several times before Miya breaks the silence.

“Say, Omi-kun,” Miya says, voice quiet, yet warm in the bite of night air. “What are your dreams?”

Kiyoomi swallows his surprise with a sip of the warm tea. “What kind of conversation starter is that?”

“Humor me?” he glances over at Kiyoomi with a sheepish smile, but the edge of his eyes are tight with something. Exhaustion, maybe. This is top-level training for their age group, to say the least. Kiyoomi is tired too.

“Okay. Do you mean what I aspire to do, or be? Or do you mean the sleeping type?” Kiyoomi answers, curious to where Atsumu wants to go with this.

Atsumu hums. Seems like he didn’t know, or didn’t consider one of those options.

“The sleeping type, then,” he finally decides. “What secrets does Sakusa Kiyoomi’s subconscious want to tell us?”

His dreams are boring, to say the least. They’re always mild abstractions of things he did earlier that day, earlier that week, just with the faintest hint of absurdity like Komori in a banana costume for the libero uniform. He says as much to Miya, who crows quietly with laughter anyways.

“No, that’s not boring at all, Omi-kun. I love it,” he says, tipping his drink back once more for another sip.

This time, Kiyoomi breaks the silence. “And?”

“And what?”

“What about you? Your dreams, of either type.”

Atsumu is silent. He’s got his arms spread over the back of the bench, hand almost reaching Kiyoomi’s shoulder. He tilts his head skyward, and closes his eyes before answering.

“Nothing,” he says with a whoosh of air and a cloud of breath above him.

“Nothing?”

“Honest to the Gods, Omi-kun, I fall asleep and I wake up with nary a thought in between.”

Odd, but certainly some people never remember their dreams their whole lives.

“You say that like you have thoughts at any other time of day,” Kiyoomi says instead.

Miya snorts at that, playfully kicks out his leg to knock his ankle against Kiyoomi’s. Kiyoomi jostles his arm off the bench in return, and they finish off their drinks with mundane conversation before sneaking back into the dorms.

“Good talk, Omi-kun,” Miya whispers, right before he slips into his room. Kiyoomi just nods, unable, unwilling to break the strange magic of this whole encounter with anymore words.

===

After that, they end up spending more time together over the course of the training. They sync up incredibly well on the court too, so they end up paired together quite a bit throughout the camp.

By the end of it all, Miya hands him a slip of paper with his number, acting completely entitled. Kiyoomi texts it anyways.

And so begins their sporadic text chain. Miya will spam him with inane conversations or things from his day without expecting any response. Kiyoomi always responds, eventually. Then days will pass with nothing, and just when Kiyoomi gets out of the habit of checking his phone more than usual, it starts up again.

It’s infuriating and hilarious. It’s incredibly endearing. Kiyoomi likes it much more than he wants to admit.

===

In their last year of high school, Spring High round three, Inarizaki triumphs over Karasuno. Itachiyama wins against their own opponent. They aren’t bracketed to meet in the quarterfinals—haven’t matched up since their last Interhigh final, actually. Now, they never will. Kiyoomi makes his way to a vending machine after cooling down, one in a more deserted part of the building, and stumbles across Miya.

He’s leaning against the wall, drink in hand, but unopened. He stares up at the ceiling blankly, doesn’t acknowledge Kiyoomi in any way even though they’re the only two people nearby. Kiyoomi purchases his own beverage, then goes to stand right in front of him, using his slight height difference to his advantage.

Atsumu’s eyes register Kiyoomi once he’s looming, and a slow smile stretches over his face.

“Hey, Omi-kun. Fancy seeing you here.”

“Miya,” Kiyoomi starts, “it’s been a while.” And it has. They’re currently on a not-texting part of their routine, though Kiyoomi imagines it may be because of the tournament.

“Nice game,” Miya says.

“Same to you,” he answers, waiting to see where Atsumu will go with this. Will it be another exchange of half-joking, barbed insults? Or more questions about dreams, hopes, desires?

But Miya offers nothing else. He looks down to his drink, and slowly opens it, taking a drink with deliberate care. Kiyoomi settles against the wall next to him and sips his own.

It’s their third year. They have no reason to meet up after this, as far as Kiyoomi knows. For all their text conversations, future plans didn’t come up once.

“Where are you going? To school, I mean. Or whatever. After this” Kiyoomi says, now that he’s thought of it. Somehow, it’s a struggle to offer the most basic of conversational overtures.

Miya gives him a strange smile at that, though Kiyoomi isn’t sure the question warrants such a face. It’s...wrong somehow, doesn’t angle quite right on his normally earnest face. It feels like there’s suddenly a lot of noise between the two of them, a slight distortion of reality. Miya has a wall up, but Kiyoomi doesn’t know why.

“I’ll be around, Omi-kun,” is all Miya says with no indication of elaborating. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you eventually, for sure. But now, I gotta go catch up with my team.” Then, inexplicably, he spins to stand in front of Kiyoomi, and reaches up to grip both shoulders firmly. He looks Kiyoomi straight in the eyes, and smiles, much more genuine this time. Almost fond, even. “Good luck!”

Kiyoomi is so flabbergasted he can’t even think to wish him luck in kind before Miya is already walking off, one hand up in a half goodbye. Kiyoomi waves, even though Miya doesn’t look back.

===

Kiyoomi graduates in the spring. He enters his top choice university. He plays more volleyball.

He only hears from Miya once after that. It’s unexpected. After graduation, the messages started to dwindle a little, then completely stopped. Just the usual side effect of post high-school life, no doubt, though it stung a little.

It’s his second year at university, almost midterms. He sees the text, thinking it’s from a friend or his mom, but does a double take when he reads the contact name.

**Miya:** Hey. Omi-kun, good luck. 

**Me:** Blessings from you of all things?

 **Miya:** Haha, I guess you could say that. Or you could just say “thanks”

 **Me:** Thanks. Though I don’t know how you knew about my midterms.

 **Miya:** I didn’t. Call it serendipity, I guess.  
**Miya:** Hey, I gotta go, but it was good talking to you. Catch you later, Omi-kun.

He calls that “talking”? Radio silence for almost two years, then four messages? Bewildering, but Kiyoomi has midterms to focus on. He mentally notes to rekindle their conversation afterwards, then promptly forgets.

After that, nothing. Not a single text. Not even a mention in Volleyball Monthly, which surprises Kiyoomi. Sure, many exceptional players leave the sport after high school, but he didn’t think Miya would be one of them, not after what he saw at the training camp.

It’s odd, to say the least. First, that Miya, by all accounts, disappeared from the national volleyball scene, but then more because Kiyoomi realizes that actually, maybe, just a little, he might be missing Miya.

At one point, he finds himself reaching for his phone again and thumbing to their message thread, over a year old at this point. He wonders how to initiate the conversation when it’s always been Miya leading.

**Me:** Miya? **  
** **Me:** Atsumu?

_Message not sent._

===

Sakusa Kiyoomi joins the MSBY Black Jackals in the spring of 2018, so fresh from graduation he still feels like he needs to brush the cherry blossoms from his curls.

He’s recruited straight from university. He doesn’t even need a tryout—perks of being the collegiate MVP. He has offers from throughout the V.League, but the Black Jackals are serious contenders for the title this season, and Kiyoomi always likes a challenge.

He walks into the locker room at the training facility in Higashiosaka on his first official day of practice and nearly runs into somebody else as he turns a corner. Firm hands catch his shoulders, and hold them both steady.

“Sakusa?” a voice says, wholly unfamiliar, but with an oddly recognizable lilt, the dialect instantly bringing back images from over four years ago, like no other encounter in Osaka has yet.

Kiyoomi looks up, and has a strange moment. For a second, it’s like there are two worlds overlapping, and he’s in the seam, pressed between two visions of the man before him. One, much younger, somehow brighter than the other. Then the image fades, and a dark haired Miya removes his hands from Kiyoomi’s shoulders sheepishly.

“Geez, sorry ‘bout that. I heard you were starting today, guess I didn’t expect to see you so early though.”

“Miya?” Kiyoomi’s mouth is still catching up with his brain. And again, as soon as he says it, he knows something is wrong. This is a Miya, but not the one that Kiyoomi knows. “No, you’re—you’re the other one. Um. I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

For a moment, Kiyoomi thinks he looks offended—his brows lift in surprise, then his gaze hardens for an instant and his mouth clenches infinitesimally, but it relaxes just as quickly, back to a neutral, almost sleepy expression.

“It’s Osamu. Miya Osamu. Your new setter, Sakusa-san.”

“Where’s Mi—Atsumu?”

“Um, well. It’s sort of a long story—can we talk later?” Mi—Osamu answers carefully, cryptically. His face is neutral, but Kiyoomi’s heart drops all the same. That’s not a good answer, no matter the circumstance. 

“Let’s just get you into practice first, okay?” Osamu says, trying for a reassuring smile.

===

The first practice goes well, despite the strange first encounter. Playing with the Jackals is everything he expected and more. Osamu’s sets feel eerily familiar too, almost exactly like what he remembers from that now-distant training camp. But it’s the wrong Miya, and every toss just makes him want to know why even more. 

He rushes back to the locker room as soon as practice is over to shower and change, unsure of Osamu’s plans and not wanting to miss him or make him wait. He needn’t have worried—Osamu joins him at his locker by the time Kiyoomi finishes packing up.

“You free now?” he asks, casually, like this isn’t going to be a conversation about his absent brother.

“Yes. Please. If,” Kiyoomi falters suddenly, poignantly aware of what this must mean. He swallows. “If you’re up for it, I mean.”

Osamu nods. “It’s okay. I have something to tell you too. Let’s go somewhere private for this.”

===

Every few decades or so, a God is born into this world as a human child. They’re born with someone by their side, someone who will never fear them and stays close to them until they return to be one with the world. That is the role of a Beholder.

Osamu tells him this matter-of-factly as they sit on a bench in a nearby park. It’s not something Kiyoomi hasn’t heard before. He knows the story of Gods and their Beholders. He didn’t know there was one in Japan, much less that it was Miya Atsumu.

“He didn’t want people to know, you know,” Osamu says, reading the shock and conflict on Kiyoomi’s face from beside him. “It was easier, sometimes, with volleyball, and with the youth camp especially, since nobody really knew about it in the national scene.”

Osamu tells their story—Atsumu’s story, and Kiyoomi listens. When he finishes, Kiyoomi doesn’t know what to say. He’s sorry? He wishes things could be different? He missed Atsumu, too? All of those things are obvious, though the last one is more of a private revelation.

Osamu lets him sit with his thoughts for a bit, no doubt lost in his own. Then, he shuffles his feet a bit, and turns his body to face Kiyoomi fully.

“You know, it’s a custom for the Beholder to offer the jewel to a shrine after, well, they go. But, as it turns out, none of us do. Not many people know what a God’s jewel looks like, anyways. Not anyone who’d care for the custom, at least.

“But Atsumu had one request for his, so, um. Here.”

Osamu presses something warm and solid into his hand, and Kiyoomi looks down. It’s a little uneven around the edges, but it’s still a beautiful, crystalline gem, golden-hued and shot through with tinges of pink. It reminds him of mornings, of dawn. 

“He wanted you to have this,” Osamu says.

“I. I couldn’t possibly—”

“Please,” Osamu stops him, closes his hand around Kiyoomi’s to cup the jewel between them both. “Please. I know that maybe you think you didn’t know him well, or for very long, but for all his pitfalls as my brother he was still—still a God. He couldn’t really want things, he couldn’t be with people, not really. He could never belong to _anyone,_ but once—just once, he wanted to belong to you.

“You know, a Beholder is supposed to, well, ‘see’ the God’s life, from beginning to end. He didn’t get a choice with me. I’d be his twin either way. But I think he only ever wanted to be ‘seen’ by you.”

Kiyoomi doesn’t say anything. He can’t. This is too much—too much he didn’t know, too much to learn, to remember, too much that could have been and never will be. He’s not sure if he wants to cry or go yell at something, someone, somewhere, maybe just the heavens, for such a fate.

“It’s okay if it doesn’t mean anything to you now, or later, or ever. You can, heck, you can leave it at a shrine if you want,” Osamu says and then looks at Kiyoomi with a kind of quiet resolve, “but I’m going to look my brother in the eyes the next time I see him, this life or the next, and say that I did what he asked. I saw his things through until the end.”

See things through to the end, huh? But what kind of end does this make, Kiyoomi wonders, clenching the jewel so tightly in his hand that the uneven ridges dig into the rough of his palm with a sting of pain.

Osamu is waiting, Kiyoomi realizes, and he nods frantically, then stutters. “No. I mean, yes, I will keep it. I will cherish it, really,” he starts rushing to explain what he means, what Atsumu means—meant?—to him, but Osamu just nods. He understands, probably more than anyone.

They sit like that, quietly together, lost in thought. The sun warms them where it falls in patches through the branches above. Spring teases the city; the cherry blossoms are gone, but the pale green leaves unfurl like soft fur on the trees and the wind is gentle, playful. It’s entirely unlike that one night outside of Ajinomoto, in the dark, in December, but all the same, it suddenly feels like Atsumu is there too.

* * *

His name was Miya Atsumu, and he was a God. To Kiyoomi, he was only ever Miya, though, and he never got the chance to be more, not in this life. 

But—

“Say, Omi-kun,” a voice, warm like early autumn sunshine, cuts through the air. A small golden stone, flush with the palest hints of rose like clear morning sunrise, rests lightly against Kiyoomi’s sternum, affixed to a sturdy cord around his neck. It feels warm to the touch, perhaps from his skin, but somehow, it always feels warm no matter when Kiyoomi picks it up.

“What are your dreams?”

**Author's Note:**

> The word used for ‘Beholder’ in the original manga is 見届け人 “Mitodokehito” (well, so Google transcribes for me), or “a person whole see [something] to its end” (credit to fan translation from Marumochi Scans!). Which. C’mon. How could I not attach that to Sakusa sees-things-through-to-the-end Kiyoomi? Now, realistically, Osamu is the Beholder here, but I wanted to twist the ending a bit, like Osamu saw his brother through to his end on this mortal plane, so to speak, but it was Atsumu’s request to see the rest of his “time” through with Kiyoomi.  
> \---  
> This is a little AU that has been festering in my heart ever since I read the oneshot back in...August? But really, the manga broke me a little. However, I wasn’t sure how to approach it—from the angle of Osamu as the Beholder? Or making Sakusa the Beholder, since they “see things through until the end.” So to avoid the periodic heartache I got thinking about it, today I just. Sat down and wrote it as a combination of both. It’s certainly not my most, hm, “planned out” writing, and much is left to implication, so it’s a little rough in spots, and the timeline might be a little wonky, but I hope you enjoyed(?) a bit of it anyways.  
> This has not gone through as rigorous of an editing process as my usual standards, so if you see something _drastically_ amiss, please feel free to let me know! 
> 
> Please come yell at/cry to me on [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/tirralirralirra/status/1351779928581275649?s=20)


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